Expert blind spot among pre-service and in-service teacher: beliefs about algebraic reasoning and potential impact on engineering education

• Autores: Anthony Petrosino, Prateek Shekhar
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2018, págs. 97-105
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Mathematical modeling involving algebraic representations plays a crucial role in the problem-solving process and is anintegral component of engineering practice. Graduates from science and engineering backgrounds are often recruited toteach engineering-inspired K-12 mathematics courses. However, due to the expert blind spot (EBS), teachers with expert-level content knowledge might not be able to teach as effectively as expected in their area of expertise. In this article, wereport the findings of our study examining EBS among pre-service and in-service teachers engaged in an engineering-inspired teacher training program involving algebraic representational problems. The participants performed a rankingtask where they ranked six problems in accordance with the ease or difficulty they felt that students enrolled in a beginnerlevel algebra course would experience when solving them. In addition, an open-ended question asked a representativesubset of the participants about their assumptions and explanations behind their indicated rankings. We found nosignificant differences in the mean scores between pre-service and in-service teachers for all of the six ranking taskproblems. This suggests that teaching experience does not have an effect on the perceptions of algebraic problem difficulty.These findings replicate and extend the EBS hypothesis that it is well-developed subject matter knowledge specifically thatleads high content knowledge pre-service and in-service educators to inaccurately predict student’s problem-solvingdifficulty. The findings suggest that EBS about algebraic problems is resilient to change in spite of teaching experience andtraining. Implications for K-12 engineering education and STEM integration are discussed.